only in moments of crisis when normal claims to leadership are
losing their authority is such authority likely to appeal. Equally such
leaders usually claim to represent new potential sources of moral
authority – be they God (Mohammed), the nation (Hitler) or the
people (Mandela). As the examples quoted suggest, such authority
may be exercised in many different times or places, for good or for
evil. These categories of authority were intended by Weber as
morally neutral.
What is justice?
If authority is power exercised in accordance with the law, we might
reasonably ask: what is so special about the law? As we have seen,
followers of Hobbes might be quick to assert that the alternative is
violence and chaos and that almost any law is better than no law at all.
Many people, however, would tend to associate law not only with
order, but also with justice. For many people law must have a moral
dimension to be acceptable; the ‘order’ enforced by the law must be
of a morally defensible character. What, then, characterises such a
just society? This is one of the oldest questions in political theory
addressed directly by the first major classic text – Plato’s Republic.To
give some idea of the debates surrounding the term we shall examine
not only Plato’s somewhat conservative answer to this question but
two later approaches: that of the utilitarian theorist Jeremy Bentham
[1748–1832] and that of the liberal writer John Rawls [1921–2002]
(see Box 3.2).
Plato’s answer is presented as a dialogue between his teacher
Socrates and some of his friends and colleagues. One friend quotes a
rival teacher, Simonides, to the effect that justice consists in giving
everyone their due. This is interpreted as doing good to our friends
and harm to our enemies. This is easily dismissed since, if our
enemies are good men, this would clearly be immoral. Further
reformulations of this idea also seem to be logically untenable. At this
point, another colleague, Thrasymachus, advances what he sees as the
realistic view that justice is ‘the interest of the stronger’. He defends
this apparently paradoxical point of view by identifying justice with
carrying out the law and asserting that the strongest will dominate
the government of any country and rule in their own interests. (A
version of what we shall later describe as elite theory.)
CONCEPTS 57